During the COVID-19 lockdown period, we can offer home blood testing of in place of the Orassy Wellness Assessment. Alternatively you can choose to have a longer, more detailed online Ultimate Health doctor consultation in place of the initial assessment. A report will follow with your recommended individually-tailored treatment programme.

Blood Pressure

Blood pressure is a critical measurement that tells you how hard the heart is working. Blood pressure levels may be normal, high or low. High blood pressure or hypertension has been called the “silent killer” as it doesn’t present symptoms and can cause serious problems such as heart attack or stroke with little or no warning. What does your blood pressure reading mean?

Blood pressure is the measurement of the force of blood against the walls of the arteries in the heart and is measured in millimetres of mercury. The heart pumps blood around the body through the arteries, by contracting and relaxing. The pressure of blood flowing through the arteries varies at different times in the heartbeat cycle. Hence, there are two numbers recorded during a blood pressure reading, systolic and diastolic blood pressure. The systolic blood pressure refers to the measurement when the heart muscles are contracting, forcing blood out of the heart and around the body. The diastolic blood pressure is when the heart muscles are relaxed, and the chambers are filling with blood.

This can be applied to one’s psycho-mental and psycho-emotional state. The anxiety-sufferer is rarely relaxed, and we see this reflected in their diastolic pressures when compared to their systolic pressures. People living life by force will often have a raised systolic blood pressure. Research clearly demonstrates the correlation between the ‘driven’ and high achieving ‘type A’ personality and heart disease (for which high blood pressure is a major risk factor). It also demonstrates the association between anger and heart disease, either outwardly exhibiting anger traits regularly (hostility), or the suppression of anger. Anger results from the suppression of fear (we push our fear away and we get angry). Hence the real link between heart disease and emotion is likely fear, which is the foundation of anxiety – which we know affects blood pressure.

Blood Glucose Sugar Levels

Blood glucose measurements give insight into how effective your body is in dealing with sugars from your food. Glucose is the body’s preferred source of energy. The highest energy demands come from your muscles and brain. When there is excess glucose it is stored away in tissues to be used at a later time with the help of the hormone, insulin. Insulin acts as a key that enables glucose transportation into the cells, allowing its use for energy production. A high blood glucose reading can indicate insulin resistance, which describes the cells’ ineffective responses to insulin, so there is less fuel (glucose) in the cells for energy production. This is a precursor to Type 2 diabetes mellitus. High blood sugar levels over a prolonged time can cause damage to your nerves, eyes, kidneys and heart in particular. Due to the inefficient hormone regulation of this condition, low blood sugar levels are a problem too, causing dizziness, weakness and fainting. It is essential to have healthy blood sugar levels to maintain optimum health and vitality.

What happens when we’re stressed? Our blood sugar levels increase as our body ensures that there is ample to deal with the increased demands. Stress can come in the form of psycho-mental or psycho-emotional stress but also physical stress through lack of sleep or toxicity. Research tells us in particular that lack of sleep is highly associated with diabetes mellitus. Sleep is one of the most important lifestyle factors determining health outcomes. It is during sleep that the body carries out its most important functions of cleaning up (detoxifying), repairing damaged cells, and restoring physiological balance. The body is under great stress when we get insufficient sleep as these processes cannot be completed and we degenerate quickly. Most people these days are running on a 1.5-hour sleep deficit on average. It is an important part of our population’s health decline. Caffeine, alcohol, sweet and refined starchy foods also significantly impact on blood sugar stability.

Salivary PH

Our bodies need a specific balance of acidity and alkalinity within tissues to maintain optimum health. The modern western lifestyle, with an excess of coffee, alcohol, sugar, processed and artificial food and drinks, stress, sleep deprivation, and indoor, sedentary living, can cause the tissues of the body to become too acidic. The consequences of this include depression of the immune system, inflammation, mouth ulcers, dental caries, heart disease, fatigue, poor gut health, and an acidic environment is favoured by cancers too. High alkalinity can be a compensatory mechanism and can also cause problems, which is why it is important to maintain a healthy pH level of around 7.5.

Heart rate Variability (HRV)

The degree to which the interval between each heartbeat varies describes your heart rate variability (HRV). When this varies sufficiently, we have the flexibility needed to adapt to certain environmental stimuli and challenges – such as reacting to stressful situations.

Heart rate variability (HRV) is an ideal parameter to detect states of stress within the body and mind. By using HRV we can accurately track our progress in the resolution of stress and other emotional issues when following one of our health programmes. HRV allows for stress analysis to be performed on four levels consisting of 13 parameters.

These parameters are grouped as follows:

The relationship between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system (the Autonomic Nervous System) and overall energy levels;

The regulatory ability of the systems with acute and chronic stress parameters;

The combined view of heart rate variability (HRV) plus additional ventricular contractions showing the stress-state of a person using six parameters and their correlation to the Psycho-Neurological-Endocrine-Immune system (mind, nerves, hormones, immune system).

Heart rate variability is directly related to the body’s interdependent regulatory systems and ultimately, their efficiency and health.

Generally speaking, the greater the HRV, the better, however it is possible to have too much variability, or instability, such as in the case of arrhythmias or nervous system chaos, which is detrimental to efficient physiological functioning and energy utilisation. Too little variability, however, indicates age-related system depletion, chronic stress, pathology, or inadequate functioning in various levels of self-regulatory control systems.

It has been five decades since scientists began to alter their long-held belief that the human body’s cells, tissues and organs – particularly the heart – strive to maintain a constant static or steady state. There has been a lot of heart rate variability research since 1965, when HRV began to be recognised for its importance in indicating or predicting various risk factors. Among these are foetal distress, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, heart disease, anxiety, depression and asthma – among other health conditions.

Many studies correlate an optimal level of HRV (HRV coherence) and coherence training to a variety of health benefits to include enhanced cognitive function, improved short and long-term memory, ability to focus, improvements in blood pressure, total cholesterol and fasting glucose levels and reduced overall stress and fatigue.

In summary, reduced heart rate variability commonly relates to poor health outcomes, but through coherence training through breathwork, health can be significantly improved.

Oxygen Update/Capnometry

Breathing is known to be an essential physiological regulator of our acid-base (acid-alkaline) balance. When we have learned to breathe too quickly or in a shallow manner, we end up with low blood carbon dioxide levels, a condition known as behavioural hypocapnia. Hypocapnia results in a respiratory alkalosis (an excessively alkaline state of our body tissues). This can have profound immediate and long-term effects that may trigger, exacerbate, and/or cause a wide variety of emotional (anxiety, anger), cognitive (attention, learning), behavioural (public speaking, test taking), and physical (pain, asthma) changes that may seriously impact health and performance. Behavioural hypocapnia reduces respiratory fitness and disturbs acid-base chemistry affecting whole body function. Symptoms and deficits triggered, exacerbated, caused or perpetuated by hypocapnia include:

You will receive a basic interpretation of all the test results on the same day. To receive a full interpretation of your results from our in-house doctor, it is advisable to follow the Orassy Wellness Assessment with the Orassy Ultimate Health consultation and programme, in which you will also be given personalised recommendations based on your results.

Human mentality is such that we often wait until a problem fully manifests, rather than trying to prevent it in the first place. Once a health problem arises, a great deal more energy, effort and time is required to reverse the process – compared to preventing it in the first place. Prevention really is far easier to achieve than a cure.